Australian Literature Week 3 contd

We completed work on Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise yesterday. Students seem to be genuinely interested in the concerns of this book. It is amazingly well written in parts and gives a real taste of the huge problems faced by Aboriginal communities in modern Australia. The closing pages of the book are bitter-sweet. They bring into focus the magically power of Aboriginal myth in summarizing and probing the contemporary situation, but they also leave one with a sense of the hopelessness of the situation… unless something is done about it by us!
Today’s session ended with our student “Sophists” think-tank group offering their views on some of the ways forward with LiveJournal and other unit-related issues. The presence of this group is really helping to create a more democratic development of teaching materials. I am very happy with the outcome so far.